by Peter Tonkin
Rose Hip had written her price list and her address on the back of Charles Lee’s secret list. Looking down at Charles’s familiar writing and remembering his words all too clearly, Robin suddenly felt in urgent need of the toilet. She turned decisively and went back to the point in the corridor where Rose had met her. Then she turned right and entered the Ladies. It was empty and she crossed to a cubicle, adjusted her clothing and sat. Numb with shock, she looked down at the scrap of paper. The list of names written on it must belong to men and women who had associated with Charles Lee in the days when he had been involved with the movement crushed in Tiananmen Square. They must still be secret revolutionaries. This was obviously a very dangerous piece of paper indeed, and she had promised to get rid of it long before it got anywhere near Chinese airspace. Fate and Rose Hip had denied her the chance. It was in Chinese jurisdiction now. Even if she flushed it down the toilet, who could tell whether the Social Affairs Department would be able to get hold of it in any case? The police regularly monitored the outwash of these toilets for drugs, she had been told. She was probably on video now.
Well, she would destroy it when she had memorised it. Safely, secretly, in private. She folded up the precious piece of paper and put it in the breast pocket of her blouse. How much of a risk could it actually be, for heaven’s sake?
She rose and flushed the toilet. Then she washed her hands, fluffed up her golden curls and walked out into the corridor, ready to pick up her case, find Gerry and get on with things.
Immediately outside the toilet door stood the chief stewardess from the plane. Her lemon face lit up as she saw Robin and she called out something in Cantonese. Robin looked up the corridor in the direction of the woman’s summons and saw two big Chinese men coming towards her. They wore the uniform of Xianggang police officers and the first one produced an identity card as he came up to her.
‘I am Captain Tang of the People’s Police Force,’ he said. ‘You will accompany us at once, please.’
9
They took Robin out the back way, missing out customs and immigration altogether. The Canton Airlines stewardess vanished but reappeared as they began to cross the car park. She was carrying Robin’s weekend case. A police car was waiting for them in an official parking space and Robin realised with a lurch that she would have been none the wiser if this had been a Triad gang out to kidnap her for ransom.
I’d better get my brain in gear here, she thought fiercely. But the combination of exhaustion, shock and low blood sugar made that easier said than done. Charles Lee’s secret list actually seemed to be burning her right nipple as it sat in the breast pocket of her plum silk travelling blouse. How long it would stay there, God alone knew. How long the blouse would stay in place was problematical too, come to that. If they had arrested her on suspicion of smuggling then a strip search was the least of the indignities she had to look forward to.
Adrenalin was added to the chemical mess in her bloodstream. She was pushed none too gently into the back of the police car. The tall officer who had arrested her slid in beside her. His colleague yelled a barrage of orders in Cantonese across the roof of the car. The boot opened and closed. There was another series of Cantonese exchanges and, with even less good grace than she had shown before, the air stewardess got in on the other side of Robin. The short officer slung himself in the front, slammed the door and they were off.
‘Do you speak English?’ asked Robin, looking at the sour face beside her.
‘Hou!’
‘Good,’ said Robin, ‘because I’d like to know what the hell — ’
‘Prease not to speak, Mrs Captain,’ said the tall officer on Robin’s left.
‘I’d just like to ask — ’
‘Prease, Mrs Captain. No need for talk now. We take you Porice Headquarters on old Harcourt Road. You answer question there. Haih? You answer question, you not ask questions. You answer then, you not ask now.’
There was no way round this, thought Robin, feeling a little sick. Better start mending a few fences here. ‘Haih,’ she said. ‘Deui mjyuh.’
The police car sped down the island, through the gathering evening. They had landed at five. It was after six now. They were twenty-four degrees north of the Equator and the tropical twilight was short. The airport highway wound down off the shoulder of Lan Tao Island and then bounced up on to the big bridge which allowed Robin a glance out over the darkening sea. It was a sight which never failed to lift her spirits and the wink of a light away down near Brothers Point made her think of big ships and shipping suddenly. And she realised that for all too long a time she had been thinking as a wife and mother. There was, deep inside her, somewhere, if only she could find her, a woman who commanded with ease and confidence some of the largest vessels afloat. Captain Robin Mariner. Woman enough to share a card with the greatest seaman of his generation — Richard, her husband.
A kind of fierce rage entered her slim, hungry body then as the speeding police car lifted up over the Zhujiang Kou waterway. It swung round so that she could see the last of the sunlight flaming against the tip of the Peak above Kowloon, and she thought of Rose Hip and her powerful businessman husband. She thought of the list which Charles Lee had given her, and she thought of the contacts, legal and otherwise, which working with Richard in this awesome place had given her. She was not some lost and defenceless child. She sat up straight and started to think more clearly.
The police car came down over Tsing Yi and hopped across to the big junction with the Tuen Mun highway. Soon it was swinging out, signalling, on to the feeder into Hong Chong Road, preparing to do the neat U-turn down between the People’s Polytechnic and the People’s Railway into the Kowloon entrance of the tunnel to the island. The tunnel was busy, as always, and the police driver, though keen to pass as many vehicles as possible, was forced to slow the breakneck pace which had characterised their progress so far. Robin tried to blank her mind and summon up some strength and resolution. They would get to police headquarters all too soon.
The tall building on Harcourt had had an interesting enough reputation when it had been the centre of the Royal Hong Kong Police. Since it had been in the hands of the People’s Law Enforcement Agencies, it had rapidly gained an unenviable reputation. Part of the reason that Robin wished to blank her mind was to expunge from it all the horror stories she had heard about people who went in there and were never seen again until their remains were found floating in Aberdeen Harbour. There was a lively debate as to precisely what equipment was available to the interrogators within that forbidding place, which produced results on human flesh so strikingly similar to propeller strikes and shark attacks.
With these thoughts intruding dangerously into the calm of her mind, Robin observed that the police car was coming out of the island end of the tunnel and round beneath what in the old days had been the Police Officers’ Club. Then, with the siren sounding and the speed building again, scattering cyclists to right and to left, the car swung round beneath the walls of the Wanchai Stadium and forged its way on to Gloucester Road. The bridges swept by overhead, each one looking more like the blade of a guillotine to the exhausted Robin. The strong commander that lurked somewhere within her had withdrawn and remained frustratingly elusive. The First House rushed by on the left. At once the Arsenal Street flyover slammed past like the last blade of the guillotine and Gloucester Road became Harcourt and the police headquarters loomed above her.
The car pulled in round the back and parked. The officers grunted. They all started to climb out. The stewardess went round to the back of the car and retrieved Robin’s case from the boot.
A firm hand closed round Robin’s arm and she was swept firmly, irresistibly, towards the back door. This opened into a long, impersonal, tiled corridor. The two arresting officers all but carried her forward. She was as effectively in the People’s Republic of China as if she had been in Bowstring Alley, Beijing, headquarters of the Social Affairs Department itself. She was bundled into a small lift. The pun
gency of ginseng hung in the air. One of her captors clearly drank the tea. The other smelt more faintly of Tiger Balm. The stewardess, by contrast, smelt faintly of Givenchy. Robin herself, to her own sensitive nostrils, smelt astringently of perspiration and fear.
The lift doors parted and they were precipitated into a large room with glass doors at the far end and plain benches along the walls. The benches were packed with people. They were all Chinese and they were all sitting patiently, sadly. One or two of them were wearing white, and realisation began to sink past the wild confusion in Robin’s mind as to what was actually going on here. Still silently, still without giving her any opportunity to stop and collect her thoughts, they pushed her forward. At the end of the room, beside the glass doors, there was a makeshift noticeboard with a big sheet of paper pinned to it. The paper was covered in Chinese writing which made little sense to Robin, but just from the way it was set out she recognised it as a list of names. The manifest of a passenger ship.
Or of a jetcat.
Robin was suddenly, chillingly, put in mind of a book she had read about the loss of the Titanic. What she saw now triggered the memory — people crowding round the lists of the passengers missing, presumed drowned.
The glass doors opened and Robin found herself in a little vestibule with three doors opening to right, left and dead ahead. The one ahead of her opened as though someone behind it had been waiting. Inside was a small room with a table in the middle of it. Round the sides of the room stood several people. On this side of the table was a single, high-backed, wooden chair. It was pulled to one side slightly and Robin was placed upon it.
Sound, motion, time itself stopped. There, in the middle of the table, under a spotlight which showed every salt mark, mud slime and water stain, sat a shoe. It was a black brogue; ferociously expensive, purchased from Lobbs of London. It was size twelve and a half and it had been handmade. She had felt it to be an unnecessary expense at the time but he had been right, they had been the most comfortable footwear he had ever possessed and he had treated them like the Crown Jewels.
‘Do you recognise this?’ someone asked quietly.
‘Can I see the sole, please?’ she asked. Her voice seemed to echo as though this tiny room was a cathedral.
Hands gloved in white latex lifted the shoe as requested. Suddenly, horrifyingly, she thought, what if his foot is still in there? She half rose, her empty stomach heaving, bright lights dancing like fireflies before her eyes. But it was empty. The obedient hands turned it upside down. There, on the instep, just up from the heel, were the initials R M set out in brass tacks. She remembered him, as though it was yesterday, tapping the tiny metal pins into the leather himself, hitting his fingers and swearing as he did so.
‘This is silly, Richard,’ she had chided him. ‘You’re not off to boarding school now.’
‘I don’t care,’ he had said. ‘No one’s ever going to steal these from me. I’m never going to part with them.’
Stricken, Robin looked around the room as the full implication of what Richard’s shoe on the table might mean began to sink in.
‘Velly solly, Mrs Captain,’ said the big police captain who had arrested her. He looked sad and sympathetic.
‘I am so sorry, Captain Mariner,’ said the sour stewardess and there were tears in her long dark eyes.
‘No,’ said Robin quietly. ‘No, I mean, just wait a min — ’ And then she fainted dead away as though she had been shot through the heart.
*
The next thirty-six hours passed as a series of nightmarish glimpses for Robin. The stewardess got to her first and as her eyes fluttered open, Robin saw that woman’s concerned face close at hand as she was raised back on to the chair. ‘Is she hurt?’ demanded a distant, thankfully familiar voice.
‘I do not think so,’ said someone else. ‘Let us send for the duty surgeon just in case.’
‘Be careful with that shoe,’ snapped someone else, still in English. ‘It may be evidence for the inquest … ’
Darkness swirled. Then cleared briefly. She was lying on a cot without a cover. A wise, benign-looking yellow face wearing glasses and a thin white beard floated like a moon above her. Her clothes were loose and hands like warm butterflies were moving over her body. Cantonese was being spoken softly. A strong fragrance of ginger filled her head suddenly. There came a slight prickling on her arm but that could have been imagination as well as injection — or acupuncture. Warm darkness surged again. Time swirled away.
Dome Stephenson was suddenly sitting at her side. ‘The doctor says you must drink this before you sleep, you poor old thing,’ she said. ‘Just as well Gerry was there, mind, or they’d have popped you into hospital, I expect. Still, you’re safe and sound now.’
‘Richard’s dead,’ said Robin.
‘I know, darling. You get some sleep now and we’ll see what’s to do in the morning. All right?’
‘What am I going to tell the twins? Oh God … ’
‘Don’t you worry about that now, darling. Just you snuggle down. Su-lin says she will have everything ready for you to go home in the morning if you’re strong enough. She and Ann Chu are liaising. But you can stay here just as long as you like. Rest now … ’
A distant door swept shut, closing away the light, and the faintest of voices came through the darkness from outside saying, ‘God, Gerry, she’s taking it hard. It’s terrible, just terrible.’
‘Who would think it with a man like that?’ said Gerry’s voice, faint and fading. ‘Going down with the Macau jetcat. After all he’d been through. I ask you. It’s incredible. Unimaginable … ’
*
Wednesday, 15 September, dawned hot and clear, but this was the last clear day for some time, for the storm moving out of the Mindoro Strait had already swung round on to a north-westerly track which curved like a scimitar pressed against the heart of the Pearl River estuary. The bright sun to the north of its towering storm clouds smote through the thin silk curtains of Dottie Stephenson’s guest bedroom and fell across the plum silk blouse which Robin liked to travel in. The white light set the dark cloth afire so that the wall above and behind it seemed to be awash with blood. As the sun rose, the beam of light moved with searchlight slowness across the floor and on to the bed at the shoulder of the woman sleeping there. Before she woke, it had crept on to her pillow and lay across her face, making the golden riot of her hair glitter as it had made the red silk glow.
Robin sat up. She had dreamed of Richard and the dream had been a happy, mildly erotic one. Her body, fooled by the pleasure the chimera had released in her, seemed full of rest and contentment.
Then she remembered. Automatically, she looked at her watch, expecting this to be Tuesday. She caught her breath. The date was clear — and had never been wrong before.
She swung her legs out of bed and thrust herself into motion at once. To stay at rest would be to fall to pieces now and Richard would never want that. She had lost twenty-four vital hours. Now she needed to think and to make plans. To talk to the people who could help her carry out those plans and then to get things done.
Shower first. Scrub some of these cobwebs out of her head. Jesus! What drugs had they given her? Then a call to Amberley School. Eight a.m. here — one a.m. there. That would wait until this afternoon. She would fly back and tell the twins herself of course. Bring them out one last time to whatever memorial she could arrange for Richard. But a shower first. Hot enough to explain the red cheeks, the running eyes.
Dottie and her amah Ann Chu heard Robin moving at the same time and both arrived at once, one with tea and the other with sympathy. Robin took both in passing. ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she called as she went. Then she paused. ‘It is Wednesday, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, dear. Careful of the hot tap,’ called Dottie, distractedly. ‘The water pressure’s not what it was, I’m afraid.’
Robin surveyed herself in the long mirror. Why did her body look the same? Why were there no marks on her flesh to r
eflect the pain within? Why was there no scar on the delicate swell of her breast to show that her heart was broken? Why was there nothing of her sorrow on the parts of her which would be hidden, and everything of it on her face which she would rather have covered if she could?
Some women, tall, thin, pale women with large dark eyes and naturally pouting mouths, suit sorrow. Their faces go pale and interesting, their eyes become dark pools brimming. Robin on the other hand looked as though she had just sniffed up a spoonful of pepper. Her cheeks were russet, her skin blotchy and streaked. Her eyes were swollen and red. Her nose was running like a schoolgirl’s. This was a deeply pathetic sight. Just as she had done when enraged with herself in the nursery more than forty years ago, she took firm hold of her hair and pulled it as hard as she could, tugging her head from side to side, trying to shake some sense into it.
She turned on the shower full blast and stepped in without taking account of Dottie’s warning about water pressure. She scalded her bottom. Now that really did hurt and she yipped like a puppy in agony and danced around the bathroom looking for somewhere cold to sit. She wedged herself into the bidet and turned the cold water full on.
Then she took herself firmly in hand, stood up, slopped across to the shower, adjusted things carefully and started again. She washed her hair very gingerly but it was still surprising to see how much hair came out with the rinse. Both ends of her were going to be very sore for the rest of the day.
She put on her travelling clothes, refused breakfast and walked through the beautiful, glittering, stultifying morning to her own house.
‘Aiyah, little mistress,’ wailed Su-lin as she walked through the door and they collapsed into each other’s arms. A good cry on her amah’s shoulder seemed to ease some of the weight on Robin’s heart and she made her way upstairs meaning to dress in a business outfit which would see her through the meetings she would have to hold before the day was out.